Magnus Supercomputer Powers Petascale Pioneers Down Under

HPC matters in Australia, where the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre’s Petascale Pioneers program is attracting the world’s best researchers with the Magnus supercomputer. As the most advanced scientific supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere, Magnus is a Petascale Cray XC30 machine with over 35,000 cores using Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors and 95 TB of memory.

Putting the newly upgraded machine to good use, the Centre has awarded almost 90 million CPU-hours on Magnus for pioneering research projects.

We had nearly three times the requests for time than what we could accommodate,” said supercomputing specialist Rebecca Hartman-Baker, who coordinated the call for proposals. The projects chosen under the program span priority areas of research from geo science to astrophysics, chemistry and bioinformatics.

These elite research projects, dubbed Petascale Pioneers, were accepted based on their ability to take advantage of the state-of-the-art technologies provided by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and Magnus. In particular, projects were chosen for grand-challenge scientific problems that would be impossible without the immense processing power of petascale supercomputing.

Australian researchers now have to access a world-class supercomputer right here in Perth,” said Pawsey Supercomputing Centre Executive Director Dr Neil Stringfellow. “In addition, we are pleased to enable collaborative research projects between local and international researchers.”

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